“Africa has the shape of a gun and the Congo is its trigger; pulling that trigger could blow a whole continent apart.”
-Frantz Fanon

Please join the Atlantic Council on Tuesday, March 15 for the launch of the Africa Center’s new issue brief, Why the Congo Matters, by Senior Fellow Gérard Prunier. 

Penned by the author of Oxford University Press’s award-winning authoritative account of the Congolese civil wars, Why the Congo Matters explores the escalating local and regional tensions that threaten to throw Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country into turmoil and situates these problems within the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s troubled colonial and post-colonial history. Arguing that the unlawful schemes to prolong President Joseph Kabila’s tenure pose profound and immediate threats to the security and stability of the country and the surrounding region as well as undermining to the Congo’s vast economic potential and even the population’s basic humanitarian needs (even as evidenced, inter alia, by President Kabila’s cynical refusal to allow children legally adopted to join their families abroad), Prunier makes the case that the United States and its allies must immediately engage with the Congo in order to prevent a new conflagration in the heart of the African continent.
 

Tuesday, March 15, 2016
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. 

Atlantic Council
1030 15th St. NW, 12th Floor
Washington, DC 20005